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REL 590.001

Capstone Graduate Seminar

W | 1:30 - 3:20

MA 210

Download Syllabus

This seminar, required of all graduating MA students, is offered each Spring semester and is an opportunity for students to consider broad theoretical and disciplinary issues that directly impact their own individual research interests. To enroll you must obtain a permit from the main office.

This semester the class will examine the undisclosed ways in which normative claims about religion are sometimes encoded in scholarship, inviting students to find and present on examples from their own areas of research.

Throughout the semester, several REL faculty members will join the course to discuss how normative issues are (or are not) evident in their research specialty.

Russell T. McCutcheon

Book cover for required book in the course

Readings

Uddin, Asma
When Islam is not a Religion
Pegasus Books, 2019
9781643131313

This book is available at the SUPe Store and online through vendors such as amazon.com.

Resources

Additional Readings

Thomas Lewis, “On the Role of Normativity in Religious Studies”

Russell T. McCutcheon, “Identifying the Meaning and End of Scholarship”

Nadeem Mahomed and Farid Esack, “The Normal and Abnormal: On the Politics of Being Muslim and Relating to Same-Sex Sexuality”

Martin Kavka and Russell T. McCutcheon, “Justice, That Fraught Idea: A Response to “The Normal and Abnormal”

Farid Esack and Nadeem Mahomed, “A Rejoinder to ‘Justice, That Fraught Idea’”

Religious Studies Project interview on religious literacy

Steven Ramey, “Accidental Favorites: The Implicit in the Study of Religion”